Previews

Project: Snowblind

A huge variety of cool weapons combine with some truly wide-open gameplay to produce a shooter worth keeping an eye on.

Spiffy:

Tons of cool weapons; wide-open levels allow you to approach situation however you'd like; augmentations bring even more choices to the game.

Iffy:

Could get passed over as "just another shooter"; minor framerate issues at times.

Nathan Frost is just a man. That is, he was just a man until he ended up on the wrong end of an enemy bomb. Now, he's a man with millions of dollars of hardware and circuitry inside of him, the perfect tool to help win a war against a maniacal general (is there any other kind in gaming today?) who wants to permanently black out the world's electrical systems. Although it might sounds like Nathan is just another in a long line of enhanced super-soldiers, he's not your average Steve Austin wannabe. Thanks to a huge variety of interesting weaponry, Nathan doesn't have to rely on his augmentations to get him through the day. Of course, his abilities make things just a little bit easier (and a lot more fun).
Project: Snowblind puts you in Nathan's shoes, allowing you to make your way through the game in nearly any way you see fit. Like the other games in the Deus Ex series (Project: Snowblind was originally going to be the next game in the franchise), this one lets you take down enemies and blow up armored vehicles using a variety of high-tech weaponry, and there's a good chance that you won't do the same thing twice. You might use grenades one time, rockets another, and landmines a third. Or, you might just find a new way to handle things. That's the beauty of the game.
When things start, though, everything is as linear as you can get, since you're supposed to be learning how to play the game. Of course, since it's a first-person shooter, most of the controls will be familiar to just about anyone who's played one before. The right trigger fires the main weapon, while the left trigger will allow you to use an alternate fire that the weapon might have (and nearly all of them have a secondary fire). The reload and jump buttons are in the standard locations, and you can toss any grenades you find using the black button on the Xbox, or the L1 on the PS2.

Once you make it through the first level, however, everything changes, thanks to an enemy bomb that lands at your feet. After a brief emergency room scene (during which you can look around at your surroundings), Nathan dies. Since the developers didn't want to make the shortest (or easiest) game in history, it's no surprise that Nathan wakes up a short time later with a new outlook on life. He's told that he's become a part of a program that develops super-soldiers by augmenting their abilities, thus giving them an extra edge on the battlefield.